Poverty maps on HarvestChoice

Data on poverty levels, important for amongst others development study, yet very difficult to get. Sure, you can get global statistics from e.g., the FAO, Worldbank, here or here. But these give you highly aggregated data (mostly by country), not the sub-national level data often needed.

Luckily for those that need sub-national level data, HarvestChoice published in 2010 global sub-national poverty maps. The maps give the distribution of various poverty indices at sub-national level. More recently, HarvestChoice in collaboration with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) produced a new series of sub-national poverty maps for sub-Saharan Africa showing the prevalence of individuals living on less than $1.25/day and less than $2/day. As you can see in the map below, not all countries are covered with the same level of detail, or covered at all. But the site mentions that other countries will be added soon.

Sub-national Poverty Map for Sub-Saharan Africa at 2005 International Poverty Lines. It shows the percentage of the population living on $2 / day. The vector layer used to create this map was downloaded from the HarvestChoice website. The map shown here was created in QGIS. Get the QGIS legend for this map here.

For more information about the poverty map, see here and here. The data can be downloaded from the HarvestChoice site (here). And if you are there, make sure to explore their site a bit further, they are offering a wide range of tools, data and publications related to agriculture and development.